Category Archives: German Expressionism

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Orienting the eye: I was all set to re-frame Charles Dufresne’s monumental painting “Retour de chasse” (The Return of the Hunting Party), above, in current and historical socio-political contexts, but then I heard about the Viennese tourism office’s cynical response to the reluctance of the cities of London and Hamburg to run its publicity posters for the country’s celebrations of the Expressionist painter Egon Schiele on the centennial of his death at 28. Rather than simply pull the posters featuring work like “The girl in orange stockings” and “Nude Self-Portrait,” it draped the subjects’ privates in banners reading “Sorry — 100 years old but still too daring today,” accompanied by the inevitable hashtag. In other words, the Viennese tourism office desecrated the art it was supposedly promoting and debased the memory of the artist it was supposed to be celebrating. I realized that even if they often comment on, rebel from, or reflect contemporary mores and debates, artists should not always be subjected to them. I also couldn’t help recall a colleague’s insistence that a female nude by Eugene Dinet — who spent most of his adult life in Algeria and converted to Islam — which we once published and which was to my eye a natural study denuded of any exoticism was Orientalism of the worse sort. (If any context could be appropriately applied to Dufresne’s circa 1913, 83 1/8 x 115 inch oil on canvas — apparently the most controversial work of the last Salon before World War 1, on sale for Artcurial’s November 28 Impressionism & Modern auction Tuesday in Paris — it would seem to be that furnished by Ballets Russes, whose version of Michel Fokine’s “Scheherezade” premiered in 1910 with Ida Rubinstein and Vaslav Nijinsky.) But the painting, signed at the lower left, ultimately deserves to be judged, evaluated, perceived, and received on its own intrinsic merits. Artcurial pre-sale estimate: 30,000 – 50,000 Euros. Image copyright and courtesy Artcurial.

NEW YORK — Sasha Waltz’s “Korper” — which traveled from its home theater, Berlin’s Schaubuhne am Lehniner Platz, to the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s 20th Next Wave Festival last week — really does feel like something new, or rather, something neo. This is what German expressionism looks like in the 21st century: a fusion form, as much deconstructed as constructed, but reliant on the German past for its root images and its ur-meanings, as I intuit them. “Korper” — which means body, and which is about the body — is a 90-minute ensemble piece with an international cast of 13. It unfolds with an eerie lack of tone. The funny, the tragic, the weird, the obscure, the preposterous — they’re all given the same weight, which gives the piece the look of surrealism and the feeling of a dream.

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